HADASSAH DAMIEN is a teacher, artist, technologist, and iconoclast who was raised working-class in upstate NY. She has put the values she inherited both into practice and under microscopes in her work as a community organizer. She has an MA from the CUNY Graduate Center, and an Honors BA from the University of Toronto. She rides motorcycles, which inspired the title of this project.

She is a nonprofit technology builder, has been a small-business owner as a technology professional, has run the financial side of small LGBTQ arts organizations, and has participated in cooperative, freelance, sharing economy, DIY and investment business ventures.
More about her at: hadassahdamien.com
Contact her: hd [at] ridefreefearlessmoney.com
RIDE FREE FEARLESS MONEY launched Fall 2015. The intention is to create recurring classes full of useful information, and “talkshop” series where people who need help handling their financial lives are able to get the information they need to take care of themselves, their communities, and their [often chosen] families in a collaborative, community-building way.
These classes are for people of all kinds and all income levels, with women and LGBTQ people in particular at the center. The teaching style shares genuinely useful skills, tips, and life hacks in a space that honors the fraught relationships we each may have with money, and the intersectional reasons for that with conversational elements.
- Women make ~$0.78 on a man’s $1.00, and POC folks make ~$0.58 on a white $1.00 on average in the US — to me, this means it’s crucial that our cents work harder for us and we have info to strategically deal with our money.
- Dyke bars, communal houses, and queer land projects close because they are owned by outsiders who kick out these communities — to me this means owning property is one way to hold the line for community spaces. E.g. The Lesbian Herstory Archives, Idyll Dandy Acres. These spaces need resourced supporters.
- Corporations take tax writeoffs that lose our social safety nets millions, while artists, freelancers, and part-time workers struggle to make ends meet — not realizing there’s tax writeoffs for us, too
Why this project?
/ability/education — and yet these play into our experiences in important ways….which pretty much never get mentioned in money education.
I know tons about money management and I’m all heart + straight-talk.